Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200
- 212)
TUESDAY 16 JUNE 2009
SIR BILL
JEFFREY KCB, SIR
PETER RICKETTS
KCMG AND DR
NEMAT "MINOUCHE"
SHAFIK
Q200 Linda Gilroy:
I think a note would be very helpful on that, Chairman.
Sir Peter Ricketts: We will provide
one for you.
Q201 Linda Gilroy:
May I finally return to Dr Shafik? I think I am right in saying
that as of the end of last year, of the then 30 current peace
operations going on, which I know you range across, the ones under
the UN, there was only female chief of mission to the UN Secretary-General
Special Representative to Liberia, Ellen Margrethe L'j from Denmark.
Has there been any progress since then? Are you, as a leading
person in the international field of reconstruction and peace
building, aware of whether the momentum to try and achieve more
in that respect is going in the right direction, or is it stalled?
Dr Shafik: We have pressed very
hard and we think this is quite a high priority. I cannot say
there has been much progress since the one case that you identify,
but it is something on which we have pushed the UN system very
hard. More broadly, we have pushed the UN system to create a body
for gender in the UN system, because at the moment gender issues
are spread out and fragmented across a variety of agencies and
there is no strong voice for women in the UN system, which is
mad given that it is the majority of the world's population.
Q202 Linda Gilroy:
And how can a Comprehensive Approach be comprehensive unless there
is a very great deal more attention paid to this? Can any of you
tell me, for instance, what proportion of the population in Afghanistan
is female? After 20 or 30 years of warfare I believe that it is
not the 50/50 balance that would exist in a developed country.
Sir Peter Ricketts: I am sure
that is true.
Linda Gilroy: Does anybody know?
Q203 Chairman:
I think the answer is you cannot because there has not been a
census for a long time.
Sir Peter Ricketts: I think your
assumption is absolutely right.
Linda Gilroy: I have heard people say
that 60 or 70% of the population in Afghanistan is female.
Q204 Mr Crausby:
It is highly unlikely, is it not, that we will be involved in
any major conflict without at least one coalition partner, so
how well does the Government work with international bodies such
as the United Nations, the European Union and in particular NATO?
Sir Peter Ricketts: I had better
declare an interest to the Committee in that I was Ambassador
for NATO so I have a particular interest in and affection for
the Alliance. I think you are right that we would assume that
any major military commitment these days would be made in conjunction
with the United States and other allies. We have learned a lot
from the NATO experience of having to build up a really significant
military operation in Afghanistan from the slow start five years
ago, and I think that the UK is a very influential voice. We are
going to go now in NATO to the drafting of a new strategic concept
which will update the present one which is now more than ten years
old and which I hope will embody the lessons that we have learned
as an Alliance, including the implementation of a Comprehensive
Approach involving good planning between civilian and military
components, and I think in NATO we have now the opportunity. In
the EU the European Security and Defence Policy has developed
in a slightly different direction from the one we imagined when
we set it up ten years ago. We are not talking about the deployment
of 60,000 men under EU command. It has tended to go to smaller
operations, more of the political/military kind involving civilian
and military, classic Comprehensive Approach territory, and the
piracy operation that we were referring to at the beginning of
the hearing is a good example of the EU taking on leadership of
a relatively small but very complex and sensitive mission involving
civilian components as well. Again, we are, I think, an influential
voice in the development of the European capacity. As for the
UN, we are acutely concerned at the pressure that UN peacekeeping
is under. More and more UN peacekeeping missions have been created
by the Security Council. There is quite a small headquarters staff,
nothing like the planning and command capacity that NATO has,
and they are very overstretched so we are pressing hard to reform
the DPKO, the part of the UN Secretariat that deals with peacekeeping,
to cope with the rising number of peacekeeping missions and the
complexity of what they are doing, but that is an area of real
importance for the future and it is one where we have not yet
got the international capacity we need.
Sir Bill Jeffrey: I agree with
all of that. The thing I would say is that the thinking we have
been discussing throughout this session is increasingly embedded
in these big international organisations. I was at an event yesterday
evening in Paris involving the new Secretary-General of NATO and
in his remarks there was a passage that could have come from any
of our exchanges this morning, so I think the general approach
that we have been discussing is well understood. As Dr Shafik
was saying earlier, trying to operate it within the Alliance across
national as well as departmental boundaries is a degree harder,
I think. Mr Havard remarked earlier that Lashkar Gah PRT is British
led but has Americans, Estonians and Danes, I think, among its
members. There may be a model there, that if one country is prepared
to lead then others can join in. There is no doubt, as Dr Shafik
was implying earlier, and this points to one of your earlier questions,
that operationally this thinking across alliances is even more
challenging than what we have been trying to do nationally in
the last few years.
Dr Shafik: We speak the same language
more or less. I think the only thing I would add would be on the
UN. The UN is clearly moving in the direction of taking a more
Comprehensive Approach to the creation of what they call integrated
missions, which include peacekeeping and diplomats as well as
development efforts. However, it is not there yet, and I think
the Foreign Secretary helpfully chaired a session of the Security
Council last year which looked at the deficiencies in the UN's
approach and focused particularly on the UN's lack of a coherent
strategy, lack of capacity and lack of pooled funding for it to
support integrated missions. They need to do a lot of the same
things that we have tried to learn to do better—better capacity
on the ground, better common action against a single strategy,
more deployable civilian capacity, faster and more flexible funding.
It is a very similar agenda. Having said that, even though we
are not there yet it is worth making the investment because the
evidence is clear. Academic research shows that peacekeeping missions
reduce the probability of conflict by 85%, and if we can avoid
a recurrence of war it is worth struggling through the managerial
and administrative constraints that we are struggling with.
Q205 Mr Crausby:
Thinking particularly about NATO and working on the NATO command,
does NATO have any concept of a Comprehensive Approach on the
same basis that we would think about it? I know what you say about
the new strategic concept, but how could we incorporate a Comprehensive
Approach into the new strategic concept? Is that too big a task?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: On the contrary,
it is very likely to happen. It is notable how many of recent
communiqués after NATO meetings, for example, have included
language that very much reflects the Comprehensive Approach thinking.
It may not always be described as that but it is embedded to my
knowledge in the thinking of many of our partners, including the
Danes and the Dutch, to take the most obvious examples. I think
it is there and I do not think it will be difficult to reflect
it in the new strategic concept that NATO will be working towards
now. The issue is more about operationalising it in practice because
that is where it gets challenging.
Sir Peter Ricketts: I am absolutely
sure that this is going to be a key issue for the new strategic
concept and, as Bill says, the new Secretary-General as well as
the outgoing Secretary-General are very committed to this. I know
at SHAPE it is now the normal practice in planning for operations
to plan in the civilian component, so that there is a cell at
SHAPE for NGOs, there are civilian cells at SHAPE which are there
to ensure that the military planning includes planning for how
the NATO military operation will fit with civilian actors. What
NATO will not be able to do is, as it were, take under a NATO
command the civilian part of the overall Comprehensive Approach.
They will not, I think, do police training. They will not do building
governance or development work as NATO but in developing their
NATO plan they will make sure that they plan in how they will
fit with civilian actors and that is important.
Q206 Mr Crausby:
What about working with the Americans? In normal circumstances
they have much greater resources, much greater numbers. Are we
not in danger of being completely swamped by their Comprehensive
Approach rather than our concept of it? Is it possible to work
together with the Americans in relation to the size of our contribution?
Sir Peter Ricketts: First of all,
I think it is possible, yes. We have been working hard with the
Americans since the arrival of the new administration on their
new strategy, and their new Afghanistan strategy, which the President
announced some weeks ago, I think reflects a lot of discussion
and consultation with us and it is a strategy that, as our ministers
have said, we are very comfortable with, so the overall framework
inside which the Americans are working is one that we are very
comfortable with. Their style of operation, as my colleagues have
said, can be different. Of course, their scale is much bigger
than ours, but they are planning that their own surge will take
place across the whole of the south and east of Afghanistan. We
will still remain very significant actors in Helmand province
and I think the Americans will want to work closely with us and
we with them there, so I do not think they are going to overwhelm
us in Helmand and I think the direction of their strategy is one
that we are comfortable with.
Sir Bill Jeffrey: It is possible,
I think, to over-caricature the American approach as an entirely
military-heavy one. They too have learned a great deal over the
last few years and I sense that the thinking is in fact quite
close, as Peter has implied, to ours. They tend to quote the whole
government approach but in essence they are talking about the
same thing.
Sir Peter Ricketts: For example,
they are generating several hundred more state department civilian
advisers to deploy across Afghanistan and so they are tackling
the same sorts of issues as we have been tackling in terms of
increasing the civilian part of their Comprehensive Approach.
Q207 Linda Gilroy:
Dr Shafik rightly pointed to the fact that conflict costs an awful
lot of money and it was interesting to hear you say that there
could well be a place for a Comprehensive Approach within the
new security approach. Has anybody done any work on how investing
money in conflict, peace-building and reconstruction and those
aspects of future conflict prevention is actually a worthwhile
investment in terms of avoiding going back to future conflict?
I think I am right in saying that about 50% of conflicts become
conflicts again within ten years and therefore presumably the
whole approach to improving that, perhaps reducing it to 10% of
conflicts recurring within a ten-year period, would be something
which would be helpful to governments, not just nationally but
in international discussions on trying to put money into this.
Dr Shafik: You are quite right—there
has been some work on this. Paul Collier's work shows that the
average economic cost of a conflict is equivalent to all global
aid in a particular year, and so every conflict you avoid is saving
tens of billions of dollars in terms of losses that could be avoided.
That is partly why we have created the conflict pools, because,
like in the health sector, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound
of cure. An ounce of conflict prevention is worth many pounds
of conflict engagement and the conflict pools were really an attempt
to set aside resources for conflict prevention because when you
are in a conflict those resources are the first to be raided.
Much of the work that we do on conflict prevention under the pools
is that kind of slow, painstaking investment in political reconciliation
and compromise which is essential for avoiding the very high cost
of conflicts which would otherwise result.
Q208 Mr Havard:
On the question of where the Comprehensive Approach is going,
it builds on some of the things we have just been talking about
in a sense. Our definition, as I understand it from your memorandum,
is that it is a philosophy, a framework, that has to be adapted
and adopted in different operational circumstances, not a prescribed
way of doing things, a description of how you do joined-up working
and so on, so in a sense pretty obvious—it is a matter of
how you do it operationally. However, the first test for how it
is going to work is currently in Afghanistan and there is this
different approach from the US. Their idea seems to be this whole
government approach, be it enabling Afghans, the bottom-up approach,
or this business of taking lessons from Iraq. It would seem that
building the Afghan Public Protection Force from the Arbaki is
a little like the stuff they did with the Sunnis in the north
and so on, so there are lessons learned out of all these exercises
that we have already been jointly involved in. Can you say what
you think is going to be the future of the Comprehensive Approach
if we are going to look at things, also not within individual
countries but much more on a regional problem basis, for example,
Pakistan and Afghanistan together, where there are aid programmes
meant to supplement and support one another, so the Comprehensive
Approach would be the British one, the American one, it will be
in single country, it will also be on a regional basis? How do
you see the Comprehensive Approach fitting into that emerging
picture?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: I think that
if you ask what the future of the Comprehensive Approach is, in
Afghanistan there is a job still on and it is principally carrying
on doing better, if we can, in terms of the things we have been
talking about all morning. For the future, I agree that if we
view Afghanistan and Pakistan strategically as being the connected
issues that they are, we definitely need to think through what
that means, given that in one case we are there in large numbers
by invitation of the government; in another are we talking about
a sovereign government (not that Afghanistan isn't such a Government)
that is dealing increasingly with its own internal security challenges.
The point I would make about the future more strongly is the one
that came out of your evidence with the academics, which is that
we really must learn the lessons, we must not get to the point
where, after all this experience and all this improvement on the
job, the next time one of these international challenges comes
along we go back to square one. Quite a lot of what among the
three departments we are considering at the moment is how we can
best learn these lessons and pull them together so that our successors
are building on previous experience rather than reinventing it.
Sir Peter Ricketts: For me it
is, as you say, essentially a frame of mind. It is an assumption
that you will do the job better if you work together, and we do
now have ten years' worth of officials who have had to work together
through these difficult international crises. I think the key
thing is that we do not have to learn that again. If we do we
move on now from a phase where we have had two or three major
military operations going on at the same time and all the civilian
work alongside them to a period where perhaps we have fewer major
military operations. We have got to preserve the spirit of joint
working and the knowledge of each other and each other's cultures
that we have developed over the last decade. That for me is what
the future of the Comprehensive Approach should be about.
Dr Shafik: One of the decisions
that we took recently was to find a way to upgrade the role of
the Stabilisation Unit. We have got a joint team working at the
moment discussing what the future of the Stabilisation Unit should
be, what capacities it needs to house, and I think that will be
one mechanism for us in ensuring that the lessons are embodied
in the bit of Whitehall that we jointly own. There is just one
other thing I would say in terms of the future of the Comprehensive
Approach. One of the lessons we have learned is that the whole
security and justice and police set of issues was something that
we probably underestimated in the earlier days, and I think we
realise that we need to strengthen our capacity in that area.
I do think we have to keep pushing on multilateralising some of
this capacity, given the complexity of future operations and the
need to be able to have multilateral instruments to use in the
future. That is why we are investing a lot in the UN Secretary-General's
peace building report which will be coming out shortly, which
we are hoping will position the UN to be a much more effective
deliverer of the Comprehensive Approach in many parts of the world.
Q209 Mr Havard:
There seems to be almost a Comprehensive Approach emerging on
the security side and a Comprehensive Approach emerging amongst
development. Pulling them together is a real Comprehensive Approach.
That is the trick; that seems to be the tension. Within doing
that, in terms of who can deliver and how they can deliver, have
you got anything to say about the development of forms of reconstruction
forces, because the military clearly are doing tasks that they
should not really be doing and there are others who are not doing
tasks that they should be doing? What is the way forward? Are
there military standing forces that need to be established or
is there some in-between model of the sort that Ed Butler was
starting to outline for us in our last evidence session? There
is a mixture of standing forces, statutory bodies, contracting
organisations, that are partly reservist and so on. Is there an
appetite for that sort of discussion or is that something that
is being dismissed and we are going to continue to work with the
current agencies that we have?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: I think there
is an appetite for that sort of discussion. We need to be clear
about the military doing what the military can do. It is quite
striking that we have not spent much time this morning talking
about the role of contractors in the private sector. They undoubtedly
have such a role and a number of people are thinking perhaps a
little more imaginatively about how that can be developed.
Sir Peter Ricketts: I am sure
that we need to have that discussion, and certainly we would not
dismiss any of those ideas. The idea that we are developing through
our Stabilisation Unit is of a deployable cadre of people with
experience of these conflict areas, contractors but also civil
servants who will be a bigger pool we can draw on when we need
to mobilise people, but we are bound to need help from contractors
in the private sector and from the military. I think the dosage
of those various elements is something that we need to go on working
on. Partly it depends on available funding, partly on decisions
of principle about how far the military want to be used for these
sorts of reconstruction tasks, but I think there is a very open
mind in Whitehall on all that.
Dr Shafik: I should also say that
we benefit greatly from the military support. There were several
projects that we had to deliver in Iraq that we could not have
done if the military had not provided us with a security envelope
to move vast water pumps across southern Iraq, and we also work
very closely with them in a wide variety of humanitarian situations
around the world where we do not have, for whatever reason, commercial
options to deliver humanitarian aid. The military on a number
of occasions has helped us by providing air lift, ships, whatever
we need to get emergency supplies into humanitarian crises, and
that is something we are also very grateful for.
Q210 Mr Havard:
Do you think that attitude is shared by the NGO community with
which you work?
Dr Shafik: I think the NGO community
is completely fine about DFID using the military to provide support
to humanitarian operations. I think it is more problematic for
them in-country for the NGOs themselves to be seen as instruments
of or being serviced by the military, although there have been
some occasions when they have certainly been very grateful for
help on transport, for example.
Q211 Mr Havard:
And their relationship with the quasi-commercial organisations
being involved in that, would that change the view, as opposed
to governmental organisations?
Dr Shafik: How do the NGOs feel
about working with commercial contractors? Contractors who are
delivering development or military?
Q212 Mr Havard:
Possibly both.
Dr Shafik: I do not think they
have much engagement, to be honest, on the military side, but
they certainly have no issues about dealing with the ones who
are delivering development services and work quite closely with
them.
Chairman: Thank you all very much indeed
for that evidence session. It was extremely interesting, most
helpful, and I think we got to the bottom of a number of important
questions. For this unique session we are most grateful.
|
